


oh give these clay feet wings to fly (to touch the face of the stars)

by Weddersins



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst and Feels, F/M, Inspired by Fanart, Post-Canon, Post-Dragon Age: Inquisition - Trespasser DLC, Still mostly canon compliant, angst with a mostly hopeful ending, some artistic license taken when it comes to Matters of the Fade
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-26
Updated: 2020-08-26
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:35:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26115811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Weddersins/pseuds/Weddersins
Summary: One year after confronting Solas and losing her arm, Lavellan returns to Fen'Harel's sanctuary and remembers.
Relationships: Female Lavellan/Solas
Comments: 3
Kudos: 16





	oh give these clay feet wings to fly (to touch the face of the stars)

**Author's Note:**

> This oneshot was inspired by [this beautiful piece of fanart ](https://twitter.com/kalaelizabeth/status/1298312981839622144?s=20) by [Kala Elizabeth on Twitter. ](https://twitter.com/kalaelizabeth?s=20) I couldn't get it out of my head, and here we are! Dangerously unbeta'd, all mistakes of grammar and canon are my own. 
> 
> (title is a shameless reference to Dante's Prayer, which I highly recommend listening to if you are in your solavellan feels.)

She glances down at the pale green glow of her former appendage, wiggles her fingers just to watch the light play between them. Still amazed, despite herself. Of course they respond fluidly, beautifully - between Dagna’s runework and Dorian’s musty tomes, they’d found a way. It had taken them a solid month’s worth of work and experimentation before they had understood how to trap the Fade energy here, to bind it tightly in the rune worn close to her heart - and how to harness the memory of her flesh in order to construct it’s ghostly double. 

That’s what they always did, really. Find a solution, inventing one if none existed before. 

The thought bolsters her flagging hope, despite her best efforts to tamper the tiny flicker with reality.

Their luck has held out this long, and she’s been coasting on it for four long years now, ever since the sky cracked. Since the world - since all she had ever known - had unmade itself. 

She could keep coasting a little longer. It’s only been a year since she last stood in these ruins, since she lost her arm. 

Only a year since...

She chases _that_ thought away, though any attempts to banish it fully will prove futile. It is, after all, why she is here. 

Fen’Harel’s fortress looms above her, light filtering through the cracked ceiling in a way that feels otherworldly. The ruins seem not to have changed at all in the intervening days. Perhaps a bit more grass grew through the cracks in the floor, perhaps the laurel she’d taken last time had regrown - but these stones had stood long before she had first found them. Hers were hardly the only echoes here. 

A part of her wonders why it felt so important to return - or why this ruin, of all the things she has seen, continues to appear in her dreams. She squashes the inclination to assign some higher meaning to the impulse that has plagued for her weeks. It is just a feeling, nothing more. The same logic applies to her reasons for finally coming _today,_ of all days. 

Useless sentiment on her part, and nothing more. 

Her feet make almost no noise on the ancient ground, but her memories are louder than any footfall. There, to the left - a bloodstain, one from the Qunari that had almost taken Blackwall’s sword arm. His body was long gone, though whether by accident or design she couldn’t say - yet this trace of him remains. Another ghost to walk these halls in a ruin already full of them. 

At least this time, the ancient spirits haunting these stones have let her pass unimpeded. She tries not to focus too much on _why -_ doesn’t want to dwell on it, not now. They continue to glide through the ruin with unknown purpose, seemingly uninterested in her arrival. 

It makes her itch, to wander so freely. There should be more resistance - _easy_ almost always equals _trap,_ but for all her unease there had yet to even be the slightest hint of danger. 

She wonders if there will be any repercussions to using the eluvian - if some silent alarm would be raised if anyone other than one of the Dread Wolf’s pups enters the crossing. When she’d slipped past the guards and into their captured eluvian that morning, the Crossroads had been a veritable picture of industry. What was one more elf, when half the ones in Thedas now walked through these mirrors? It had been far harder to find her way back here than it had been to cross through in the first place. 

Still. She isn’t foolish enough to suspect he remains unaware of her presence - certainly not here, of all places. 

He knows. He is always a step ahead. 

It is no matter. There is no threat to her life from him - there never had been. If he had realized her approach, he would have gone through the nearest eluvian and disappeared. Just like he had been doing for months. _Years._

Always a step ahead, no matter how small she makes her ripples. 

She pauses at the last set of stairs, looks up at the looming statue, at the vibrant frescoes depicting the freeing of slaves, their blue-hued vallaslin vanishing into the hands of a weeping wolf. 

_rough hands, moving with reverence, softly gliding down the planes of her face…_

_Ar lasa mala revas_. 

A heartbeat’s consideration, consternation creasing her features for a brief moment - had the wolf been weeping, the last time she had stood before this fresco?

She did not believe so. 

Her hand almost brushes the paint before she thinks better of it. 

_Would it matter, if it had not been?_

_Yes_ , came the still, small answer inside her hollow chest. 

The well-worn gears named _calculation_ and _strategy_ began to turn, grinding together with practiced ease. He returned - he _regretted_. He has remorse, and if he has remorse -

Memory stops her, and she banishes the plans her subconscious has tried to conjure. He has regretted before. He has regretted everything since the start, and yet...

… and yet. 

Here she is, alone and unmarked and haunted by a man she never should have loved. And haunting him in turn, she supposes. 

Callused fingers trace the painted tearstains, and the faint smell of new varnish lingers in the air. 

Like the way the Rotunda had smelled, for weeks after…

_after._

It’s only a few steps between the wall and the statue that dominates much of the space, only a few more to stand between the huge forepaws of the great wolf, to meet it’s somber and unrelenting gaze. It’s so easy to sink to the dias, to lean against the cold bulk of carved stone, to tuck herself away under the wolf’s eternal gaze and believe that in another world things were different. 

She is so, so tired of the chase. Tired of holding onto hope so tightly that it cuts, of carrying a love that only burns. 

It will be a relief, she thinks, to finally let that tiny flare of hope extinguish forever, to stop arguing with Leliana and Cullen and take the more decisive actions they had been advocating for over the last year. 

_What is one man,_ they argued endlessly, _against the balance of the whole world?_

They had given her a year, a generous allotment by any standards. A year to change the Dread Wolf’s heart. And she had tried - she is still trying, even now. 

But it isn't enough. _She_ isn’t enough. 

The ache in her chest steals her breath, a rogue tear makes its way down her cheek unheeded. _Not here, not now_ \- she swipes at her eyes with the heel of her right hand, biting back the rest that threatened to fall. 

_Harden your heart to a cutting edge._

She had tried, but the only thing it proved capable of cutting was herself. 

A breeze stirs the surface of the lake, carries with it the soft noises of the wild halla still wandering the island after millennia. It’s quiet, and peaceful - she wonders if it has always been so, or if it’s heyday had seen the raucous, often unruly energy that seemed to burst from the seams of Skyhold. 

She wonders what _he_ would have been like, here. How different was that man from the one she had known?

What would he do, if he were here now? For a moment, she imagines she can hear him - near-silent footfalls in the darkened recesses of the crumbling fortress, haunting her just as his shadow haunts the shape of her dreams. 

It’s only a fanciful imagining. He would never dare to come so close. 

Perhaps…

… but, no. 

She rises, ready to leave, still unsure of why she came in the first place - a goodbye, an apology? To him, or for herself? The answer is somewhere in the depths of her heart, snarled up with hurt so tightly she doubts that it will ever be unwound. She’s nearly down the steps when she feels the tingle of raw magic against her skin, scents the bright burn of ozone that always reminds her of the Fade. Her left palm itches, and she flexes her fingers. Uncertainty roots her feet in place as she turns once more to face the dias, fear and hope alighting and then departing like nervous birds in her chest. 

Her heart wrenches, and she stumbles forward in agony, in futile belief -

The stone wolf is weeping, great green tears of raw Fade. The energy undulates across it’s carved muzzle, disappearing into nothingness before it can track further down. 

“Solas,” she whispers, and it sounds like a roar in the silence. 

There’s no reply, of course not - even if he were here, he would never reveal himself willingly. Her tactician’s mind is screaming for her to _look_ , to chase out the shadows and ensure she is alone - but her left arm moves in accordance with her heart, fingers twining with the conjured tears as if to brush them away. 

A powerful wave of emotion breaks over her, feelings that taste like a strange echo of her own - familiar, yet distinctly separate. Agony and regret, loss and longing, pride and purpose - a confusing eddy of thought, of pain. But, there is a constant, one undercurrent that remains though all the rest pools around her and seeps away. 

A love, bright and burning - hidden and bruised, denied but not diminished. 

_Mala suledin nadas,_ it says, with every heartbeat, _now you must endure._

Soft fur moves under her outstretched palm, gone in the same breath it appears. She opens her eyes to nothing - the stone wolf remains impassive, it’s tears gone. The ruins are sunlit just as brightly as they had been before the Fade touched them. 

On the surface, nothing has changed - and yet, everything has. 

_The Veil is thin here - can you feel it on your skin, tingling?_

She has long grown accustomed to sensing the worn patches of the barrier holding back the Fade, the gentle dance of static on her skin achingly familiar. But now, she can _hear_ it, snapping and fizzing like a trapped bee, running playfully over the knuckles of her left hand as if they were one and the same. She gets the sense that it would be an effortless thing, to reach out and to _touch_ it -

and so she does, her fingers brushing the fibers of reality with ease. It purrs under her caress, a contented cat welcoming home a long-awaited master. The hairs at the nape of her neck stand at attention, power running in rivers down her spine. 

The ruins fall into blackness, and all of Thedas and seems to fade away with them. Her focus spirals to a tiny pinprick of energy; like calling to like. 

The spark grows, along with her sense of it - the tang of hot metal, the bitter scent of cut felandaris; a smooth, worn bone; the crunch of snow. Callused hands and strong arms, a muttered curse fading into a whispered endearment. 

Ancient eyes set in a familiar face meet hers, narrowing in confusion before widening in recognition. 

_“Vhenan-”_

A snap, and the spark retreats - just beyond her reach, but not beyond her recollection. She pulls back, gasping as the world swims back into her senses and the Veil pools in the palm of her hand. 

She wiggles her fingers, and the Veil slips between them as smooth as silk, undisturbed but _present_ \- like the mark, but not malevolent, made wholly of her own spirit this time. 

Across an impossible distance she feels the spark jolt in surprise. 

Solas had meant to leave her the message, she realizes - that had not been an accident. He had not realized it would trigger. _.._ whatever this was, this strange interaction of her conjured hand and... what, the Veil itself? The memory of her mark, reborn in the same way they had reconstructed her arm?

There are so many new questions, and she has so few answers. 

Another breeze brushes across the surface of the lake, skimming into the dias and buffeting the veilfire in it’s brazier. She thinks of the other eluvian, resting quietly in the hidden armory below her feet. She flexes her hand, feels the Veil twist along with it. Hope swells, and this time she holds onto it. 

For the first time in a very long while, she smiles.

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hi to me on [ Twitter](https://twitter.com/weddersins)!


End file.
